DISQUS

Congratulations Josh. Another baby on the way, though? Dang, don't you guys have cable? : )

Design clipart is awesome. Also, you can use it even on models that haven't been dissected yet. When you left click on the thumbnail in the search tab of the task pane, a button pops up that can make SolidWorks dissect it on the spot. It is very fast.

Great post.

That was COE 2004 so I have been waiting anxiously for a few years for a big announcement. I guess this is it.

Josh,

I saw a video of a working prototype system like this at COE in Detroit (Dassault's version of SolidWorks World). I don't know if they guy was just really good at Photoshop and After Effects but it looked like they had the thing working pretty well. It looked just like Star Wars, "Help me Obi-Wan..." but without the cinnamon buns on the side of the princess' head.

Jeff

That is pretty cool. For those of us who were born before the Reagan administration, that might remind you of the Atari game Q-bert.

What a cute kid. Dad is sporting some nice bags under the old eyes as well. Your family is blessed.

Best wishes,
Jeff, Laura, Autumn, Evan and Elise

Josh,

Placing files on the network undermines a big benefit of PDM/PLM which is improved performance. PDM and PLM tools usually work with a local cache and when you download/checkout files from the server, the PDM/PLM tool only brings down the files that are different. This means that most of the files are loaded locally versus from a network (either LAN or WAN) and this almost always yields a significant performance improvement over the shared network location method. Working for a reseller of SolidWorks and PDM/PLM tools, I get the opportunity to see many customer sites and it is rare that I see networks that don't have latency/bandwidth issues that yield a considerably slower file open time than a local file open operation.

One customer that I remember vividly was complaining of performance issues so I went and gave them a visit. They had a really, really large assembly of a facility that they said took 47 minutes to open. We noticed that they were opening over a network so we asked them to open locally and it took 7 minutes (not as long as it sounds if you saw the assembly). We convinced them that they needed a PLM tool so they purchased one and then proceeded to set up their "local cache" on the same network location : (

Go figure.

If you are deadset on using the Network settings, though, then you got all the options correct. File, Reload is also worth mentioning when discussing collaboration too.

CAMStudio is very similar and is totally free. It doesn't have the Producer functionality but the recording functionality is a wash. You can download it here:
http://camstudio.org/

Oh now I see. Thanks Josh and Lenny for helping the slow guy. I'm caught up now and I agree that would be a pretty cool feature.

This sounds an awful lot like a feature SolidWorks added in 2007. The ability to save your part file with the rollback bar anywhere you want in the Feature Manager Design Tree does pretty much what you guys are talking about. Everything above the rollback bar rebuilds and everything below it does not. What am I missing?

I might be naive but I think it is a simple case of PTC buying CoCreate's customers so they can sell them Windchill/PDMLink and possibly Pro/E.

I was familiar with BaseCamp but not some of the others. Thanks for compiling the list. I will have to check these out.

I was just thinking about doing a write-up of Groove, a peer-to-peer file sync system that Microsoft acquired about a year and a half ago. Groove has some pretty cool capabilities regarding file-viewing and real-time meetings but it costs ~$300 per seat and I am guessing that SyncBack is free or close to it?

Thanks for the head's up. I missed this until you pointed it out. BTY - I think you meant to say "Co-founded" instead of "Confounded" unless I missed the joke.

Great post as always.

Jeff

I would hire someone who knew the industry and Pro/E. After you teach them SolidWorks and they see how easy it is to use, they will feel they are in your debt for life : )

Hilarious!